> South of south America, more or less equivalent to Florida
Are you calling North America "America", and then go on and call Florida "south America", as if there isn't such a place in the world as South America? I do not approve of this North America-centric view of the world at all.
>Are you calling North America "America", and then go on and call Florida "south America", as if there isn't such a place in the world as South America?
Depending on the geography class you took, and where, there might not be a "South America". Some countries just call the whole continent America:
Most North Americans are taught that there are 7 continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia/Oceania. In some textbooks, North and South America are combined into "America" and/or Europe and Asia are combined into "Eurasia", for a grant total of 6 or even 5.
I do not approve of your 7-continent view of the World, as if it was the only one.
>Its very obviously two continents from a geographical and cultural point of view.
Culturally? Really? What's so different culturally between Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and say, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala Costa Rica to warrant each set belonging to another continent?
As you are fully aware you are well within your rights to not approve. But if you call the whole continent America then surely its very southern part will not be Florida.
Southern would work better than south. Proper place names which have cardinal pints in their names typically will use South and not Southern. So we have South Africa, South Australia, South Dakota. But southern California, southern South Dakota, etc.
The parent post by thowawaylalala already mentions Florida, so I think what woliveirajr means by "south of South America, more or less equivalent to Florda" is at a latitude in South America with the equivalent climate as Florida, rather than suggesting that Florida is geographically "south America".
Exactly that. Considering we were talking about snow and ice causing cracks, I was thinking about the weather, not about culture, race, ethnic aspects, politics, government, food, or any other aspect...
> Well, that might be true for people living in the US but, and I might be going out on a limb here, it might not be so true for others.
And for a comment referencing Florida, is it charitable to apply something for continents to your stated interpretation? Principle of charity says not.
Specifically who refers to America/Americans in English as meaning "People who live on the continents in North and South America"? Lets hear names not an allusion to "others".
I'm only aware of a rather vocal minority of South American students recently getting angry at the term America being attributed to citizens of the USA. But its really no different from my aforementioned Mexico example in Spanish. Their category error is trying to redefine America from its shorteneed form for USA, to some super continent association of "America". But it goes against a lot of existing usage in not only English, but other languages. [1]
I respect that you have a position here, but frankly its a silly way to try to redefine the word America as its been spoken in English for a long time to refer to a super continent of both North and South America.
Example Portuguese, America refers to the USA, and to both Continents, aka like in English have to figure out the context:
http://www.wordreference.com/enpt/america
German, closer to French/English here but separate in that they tend to refer to the "americas" as north middle and south america, which is in many ways more appropo:
https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/america
Japanese, i'm not as qualified with my 3 months of learning japanese to comment on this but given the Kanji in use they're already separated:
https://jisho.org/search/america
Etc...
Also are you saying that all of the societies and engineering societies such as The American Society of Engineers should be required to change their name as they don't allow people from Canada, Central America, and South America to join? At a certain point I just can't find this position on the word America to make sense. Its just a weird thing to die by the sword on.
I refer to USA as that and its people as USAmerican or USian variously. America is a continent and whilst a good deal of North America is USA plenty isn't.
USA is a terrible name, it could equally apply to any country, Canada say, in the American continent formed from multiple states.
It is wrong to call societies only for USAmericans "The American ...". The whole thing supports the idea that the only Americans worth bothering with are USian, it's extremely pompous and self-agrandising.
You should get a proper name.
Perhaps if things work out in Korea they'll call themselves the United States of Asia ...
Re Mexico, there's no continent called Mexico, no ambiguity or appearance of narcissism attaches to not using the full title. It's not at all equivalent.
> I refer to USA as that and its people as USAmerican or USian variously. America is a continent and whilst a good deal of North America is USA plenty isn't.
America is not a continent, its two continental plates roughly separted at Panama via the Carribbean plate. Can you point me to a recording of someone using this terminology in real life? USAamerican is pronounced as ooh sa American or what? I can't see this catching on. Or oooh ess ian either. I doubt the Canadians want to get lumped in as Americans even under this nouveau definition.
> USA is a terrible name, it could equally apply to any country, Canada say, in the American continent formed from multiple states.
But it isn't that at all, which segues into:
> Re Mexico, there's no continent called Mexico, no ambiguity or appearance of narcissism attaches to not using the full title. It's not at all equivalent.
I was using that as a parallel in that we don't call mexico by its republic name.
Words can have multiple disparate meanings, America tends to have indicated a shortening of The United States of America. Do you believe citizens of this country can't name themselves?
You also conveniently omitted what english speaking region you are from so I can't follow up on how wide spread your version of things is/n't.
"USAmerican" - like U.S.A but with American replacing the A. Variations expected.
>America tends to have indicated a shortening of The United States of America //
To people who assume that it's the only place in America that anyone would talk about.
>Do you believe citizens of this country can't name themselves? //
How many current citizens chose that name; I'll go with none. If you asked the question "what should we name our union of states, one of several unions of states in America" I'd hope most intelligent people would think something other than USA was best.
I'm from the UK (which has a lot of stupid naming too, but that doesn't make USA a sensible name, bad naming elsewhere doesn't make this naming better). But for the purposes of this conversation that probably just counts as "not America" by which will be meant "not USA". /s
Yes, I was being silly. But only because if you bundle South America and North America and then go on to call the south of that super-continent "Florida", well, a globalist such as myself has to object.
> Yes, I was being silly. But only because if you bundle South America and North America and then go on to call the south of that super-continent "Florida", well, a globalist such as myself has to object.
Fair enough, but it read more as being willfully obtuse if anything.
Was correcting several statements that mobile devices aren’t computers. Lots of “computer knowledge” had to be aquired in the 90s due to the poor design of wintel boxes.
> but it could be fixed if the market demanded it.
The market (my mom for example) is unaware there is a fix.
> there is no pressure from anyone to maintain backward compatibility.
You and your manager are both part of the problem. And the phone makers, because they invented a market place for shit companies that wants to ship unfinished software and push daily updates to their users to eventually reach a point where their API is stable.
There used to exist software developers who took great pride in (API) backwards compatibility. These days, where are they? My guess is they have been overrun by the a huge crowd of new people who have never maintained a backwards compatible API and who don't know how to. Management love fast-moving people who say "yes sir" and "not a problem sir".
This is a good point too. There are people unaware of the better way! The world is coming, where one day there won't be anyone left alive who remembers things like:
1. Software that would work, un-modified, for decades.
2. Software that worked without access to some back-end.
3. Software that didn't require permission from a third party to run.
4. Software that didn't collect personal data from users.
5. Having root/admin access to your own computer/devices.
We can still prevent this from coming true, but it's going to happen if nobody pushes back on these practices.
There is no money in selling software apart from a service these days. Part of it is due to the open source movement and expectation that the software is free while you pay for support/services. Software as an entity that you buy apart from a service has been devalued.
I'll brush off your sneer at my perceived lack of ability. Of course I can do API back-compatibility. But everything comes at a cost that has to be weighted against the corresponding benefit, and the apparent benefit (to management) in this case is near-zero: most people don't care, and the ones who do care aren't going to single out and stop using our app because of it, because all the other apps do it as well. It is, unfortunately, a coordination problem that is not likely to be solved anytime soon.
> I'll brush off your sneer at my perceived lack of ability.
This is an admirable sentiment. Thank you for making HN a better place.
> But everything comes at a cost that has to be weighted against the corresponding benefit, and the apparent benefit (to management) in this case is near-zero
Software can have virtues that do not present short-term benefits, but instead contribute to a wholesome UX, even to captive users. It is the responsibility of the software developer to make these hard calls and stick to their guns in the face of management pressure.
I've been looking for an approachable read on waves and so I like this very much. A nice touch is the retro visitor counter at the bottom of the page. Made me nostalgic. When I got to it it said ~1600. I reloaded the page and it was almost at 3000. The power of HN I guess.
Also, for any folks who immediately scroll down to see it: the hit-counter only loads a few seconds after the page initializes. This was done intentionally to avoid adding yet another thing to the busy period of initial mount. It means visits of less than a few seconds aren't counted, but -shrugs-.
> you can set "Document user activation" in chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy & relaunch.
That won't fix the problem of auto-playing video on CNN or other sites that are not YT. Trying to read news from CNN is still a matter of waiting for the page to load, then wait for the video to load and start playing, then click on the pause button, and voila you can read in peace.
Creating an app and calling it "protection" when it is in fact spying on you to give FB a glimpse of how you use the internet, this is something you are defending?
And also, did you just call the gizmodo article "fake news"? It this [0] then also fake news to you? Seems to me you are getting your true news fix from a news feed somewhere.
Are you calling North America "America", and then go on and call Florida "south America", as if there isn't such a place in the world as South America? I do not approve of this North America-centric view of the world at all.